Helping Los Angeles County Chart a Course Toward Universal and Targeted Home Visiting

Summary

This year, the CDN leveraged birth and child protection data to inform the board motion, Strengthening Home Visiting in Los Angeles County: A Plan to Improve Child, Family, and Community Well-Being. This motion is helping to chart a course toward universal and targeted home visiting, where home visiting is offered to every mother giving birth countywide, and families at highest risk of adverse outcomes are prioritized for more intensive services.

To that end, we conducted a landscape analysis of all evidence-based home visiting programs currently operating in LA County. The resulting report, Newborn Home Visiting Programs: In Los Angeles County: A Primer, presents each program’s goals, intensity, funding streams, and catchment areas (visualized as a map). In addition, we estimated the number of slots needed for a universal system in LA County by examining birth records. We also leveraged our prior work with linked birth and child protection records to risk-stratify recent births. Using these linked data, we examined potential cut-points for tiered services, estimated the number of slots needed per tier, created maps of potential ‘demand’ for each tier, and generated baseline data that could be used for evaluation purposes.